It’s a week since the New Year began. I had planned to do this post last week to welcome the new year. I had intended to write a much longer, more reflective post, but I didn’t. So here are the two photos I was going to use to illustrate that more interesting post that I didn’t write.
Any morning that I head to the roof to watch the sun rise, I am never quite sure what I will see. Even as I climb the spiral staircase, navigating the narrow space left by the recently installed guttering, I am uncertain what will greet me. Like the morning I took this series of photos…a chilly, overcast morning. Grey was the main colour, as I sat and drank my tea. Little did I know the drama that was about to unfold!
A heavy bank of clouds hung low in the eastern sky, over a bowl where two hills overlapped. As the sunlight began to shine up from behind the hills, a pink pattern started to appear on the clouds.
I realised that nature was deciding to dance this morning and I was a lucky witness! Brighter pink and over a larger area of cloud…
And this was the finale! The sky on fire…transformed…
Tea forgotten; no journaling done. I watched, transfixed. Bathed in this sunrise surprise….
Things come to your notice in a variety of ways, some of them unexpected. I was reminded of the Remembrance Day ceremony at National Heroes Park by a Ministry of National Security tweet on Friday.
Today being the hundredth anniversary of Armistice Day and never having been before, I decided to go to the memorial ceremony. There was adequate parking at National Heroes Park, and as I walked inside the entrance, I was encouraged to make a donation to the Annual Poppy Appeal, which I did.
While I was waiting for the ceremony to begin, I saw a gentleman walking around with poppies and heard him telling someone at the end of the row I was sitting in that he was 85 and that people called him the Poppy Man. I intended to speak with him at the end of the ceremony to ask his name, but unfortunately I didn’t see him later.
The National Memorial Service was scheduled to start at 10:55am, with the official arrivals beginning earlier.
(This is a link to a copy of the full programme for the Remembrance Day 2018 service.)
Time, like an ever rolling stream,
Bears all its sons away
– O God, our help in ages past – Opening Hymn
(The period of silence commences and ends with a one-gun Salute. The Last Post is sounded by the JDF buglers.)
The Exhortation was read by Mr Gerald Manhertz, who I was told after the ceremony is 90-years-old and is one of the few living Jamaicans to have served in World War II.
The National Anthem was sung before the Wreath Laying Ceremony.
Justice, Truth be ours forever,
Jamaica, Land we love.
– National Anthem
Once the ceremony ended, there were the official departures…
…after which people milled around, talking and taking photographs….
I am glad that I attended the Memorial Service today. Acts of remembering are important to a society. 
I was up in the hills with family last week, in the Blue Mountains, probably my favourite place in the world. One night I sat on a balcony, watching lightning flashing over Kingston just after sunset. I called my granddaughter to come and see & she climbed up on my lap to watch with me. After the first flash of lightning lit up the sky, she said, “More!” I explained to her that the lightning doesn’t come when we want it to, but that if we sit patiently and watch, we might see it again. And we did, a few more times. 
There are so many smaller things to see also, like new mango leaves in the morning rain…
…moss growing on roof shingles…
…and cat tails (Acalypha hispida) sparkling with dew…
My love for the Blue Mountains goes back to childhood summer holidays, when we used to spend time at the Jamaica Defence Force (JDF) camp at Newcastle. It was possible to rent some of the cottages and my siblings, cousins and I remember those times as magical.
Just part of Jamaica’s Blue Mountain range…
I normally take photos of this coconut tree at sunrise. I must have taken hundreds of photos of it over the years…against spectacular red skies or pink clouds…or lit by sunlight as the sun comes over the mountains…or in silhouette…sheltering doves or baldpates or on one occasion a very steely-eyed johncrow. But today I photographed the coconut tree, not as the sun was rising, but as it was setting…
This meant that I was standing on my roof with my back to the setting sun…
…seeing coconuts at various stages of development…
…some very small ones, just starting out….
And all the while, behind me, the sun continued to set…
If you want to learn more about the Fibonacci sequence in nature, this isn’t the place to do it. It is a fascinating topic and there are many sites on the internet with all you could hope to learn. There are even some sites dealing specifically with the Fibonacci sequence in cacti. In this post, however, I am simply going to share some cacti photos…perfectly prickly patterns.
One Sunday morning during a recent trip to London, I visited the arrid room of the Barbican Conservatory with my daughter Kimi. I spent a happy hour or so looking at details of these plants through a camera lens.
Cacti are definitely strange-looking plants that could have been designed by sci-fi writers to inhabit dystopian landscapes. Certainly the natural environments in which many of them originally evolved and thrive are often stark and harsh. And their characteristic spines present a formidable defense mechanism, as anyone unfortunate enough to have had an upfront and personal encounter with a cactus can attest.
They are also remarkably beautiful plants, often as a result of their prickly patterns… viewed from a distance…
…or a bit closer…
There are wide varieties of cacti, with some not fitting the typical image at all…”windswept” spines, for example…
…or something rather like a sponge or a brain…
Their flowers can be beautiful also, in a traditional way…
…or they can be distinctly odd…
But always such intriguing patterns. I must spend some time photographing the cacti in my own garden at home soon.
After the arrid room and its cacti, Kimi and I went on to brunch, which was beautiful in another manner entirely!
The morning after Gilbert had raked its eye across Jamaica’s spine, blasting through decades of complacency and careless wishes to experience a real hurricane, I went to see how a nearby neighbour was doing. Part of his roof was sitting in our front yard and when I got to his house, I could see that all of the roof had been blown off during the storm. He was all right, he said. He and his sister, both of them quite elderly, had retreated to the only part of the house with a concrete slab roof and his family had called and were on their way to help.
But, he told me, I could expect the next mango season to be a bountiful one. The hurricane would have pruned branches, shaken up the roots and new life would be coursing through the trees that had survived.
And he was right. The massive old Bombay mango tree in our back yard has never borne fruit as abundantly as it did in the post- Gilbert season. Not in the thirty years since Sept 1988. 
It was an old and venerable tree even then. Older and even more venerable now. It has had encounters with subsequent storms that have brushed past since. 
This year hasn’t been a very good season for the old Bombay tree, in fact. Relatively few in number, with a high incidence of worms in the ripe fruit.
The height of the hurricane season is still to come.
I don’t believe that there have to be storms for there to be good crops, not literally or figuratively. But my Bombay mango tree may be aligned with my old (long deceased) neighbour’s words.
